The GovFresh Podcast

In Hack to the Future: How World Governments Relentlessly Pursue and Domesticate Hackers, Emily Crose offers a cultural, historical and legal schooling on government’s approach to hackers and hacking.

The relationship between hackers and the government has evolved over the decades, from combative to somewhat congenial, but it’s continuously complicated.

In this episode, Emily and I discuss the evolution of hacking and how governm...

The PDF, short for portable document format, is a file format created by Adobe that lets people easily create documents.

Government loves PDFs. They’re used for meeting agendas and minutes, newsletters, staff reports and, well, everything imaginable.

When not created properly – and often they aren’t – they are inaccessible. But there are broader public service problems PDFs cause, particularly in the machine-readable direction we...

In December of 2019, a small, ad hoc team assembled for a 90-day experimental project. Called California Alpha, its goal was to help the state rethink government digital service delivery. Its members – picked from government and private sector – had never collectively worked together. Their mission was to create – in three months – a culture and product that embodied a new way of delivering services to Californians – one that focus...

Whether it’s cultural or political, sometimes government isn’t amenable to working with civic hackers. But as they say, “hackers gonna hack,” and designers and developers will always find a way to leverage their skills and passion to help fix something they see as broken. Citizen journalist and civic technologist Carlos Moreno shares his experiences and lessons learned civic hacking. Carlos talks about the dynamics of hacking when ...

Steve “Spike” Spiker talks with The GovFresh Podcast about his work in civic hacking, including co-founding OpenOakland, which served as the Code for America Brigade in Oakland, Calif. He shares his thoughts on why civic hacking is important in a healthy digital democracy and how hackers and government can show up and effectively work together. Spike shares a thoughtful retrospective on his time pioneering and actively civic hackin...

With police violence in the news, and public scrutiny on the rise, law enforcement is turning to mindfulness to help officers deal with the stress that comes with the work. They are introducing new tools and techniques to help officers better engage with the communities they have sworn an oath to protect.

Policing is an incredibly stressful occupation – physically and psychologically. First responders and law enforcement are faced...

For those in need of social services – unemployment, housing, healthcare, food – the safety net isn’t easy to navigate or access.

And the COVID crisis has exacerbated this reality. There has been a dramatic spike in benefits claims, especially in communities of color and those that were already teetering on the edge. This pandemic has spotlighted the extreme inequities of the haves and have-nots, and the very broken social safety ...

Participatory budgeting is a process that empowers community members to help decide how to spend part of a public budget. PB started in Brazil in 1989, and has since spread to more than 7,000 cities around the world. It has been used to decide budgets from states, counties, cities, housing authorities, schools, and other institutions. The New York Times calls PB “revolutionary civics in action.”

In this episode, we talk with Parti...

Sustainability is a top priority for environmentally-conscious global leaders, and it’s an issue that we’re all faced with on a daily basis, but what role should local government play in mitigating the climate crisis?

In this episode, we talk with environmentalist and local government leader Rick Cole. Rick served as city manager of Santa Monica from 2015 to 2020, where he spearheaded ambitious initiatives on climate, homelessness...

Sometimes, government works on the wrong problem.

By identifying the right problems to work on — and solving these with a performance and purpose-based mindset — government can better serve its true mission.

“Peak Performance” author Brian Elms thinks government should be constantly asking itself questions like, “Should we be doing this at all? Are we the ones that should be doing it? If not, can we stop doing it? Can we figure o...

Government has historically been challenged in effectively leveraging technology to best serve the people. There are numerous, well-documented cases of public sector mishandling of technology projects, from the very public failed launch of Healthcare.gov to the many unseen, ineffective IT implementations that occur on a daily basis.

A decade ago, a movement of civic hackers — technologists working for good — inside and outside gov...

Starting in 2017, a wave of new political candidates began pursuing elected office at all levels of government. Many of them have been historically underrepresented in public leadership. With the support of organizations like Run for Something, fresh faces are getting elected to serve the communities and causes they care about.

In this episode of The Government We Need, we talk with Sarah Horvitz, National Political Director of Ru...

The internet was not originally designed with security in mind. In the early days, this was OK, but today the landscape is more complicated because, in the internet+ era, nearly everything is connected to the internet. A spreadsheet crashes, and you lose your data. A heart device crashes, and you lose your life. Both are computers, maybe connected to the same CPU or operating system. The only difference is that the computers are at...